Entertainment

5pm Won't Shorten Your Work Day, Yet.

The trend for project management sites seemed to peak earlier this year, but 5pm has come onto the scene this week with an online tool to manage your projects online. It functions from one main screen with two panels and a set of tabs. The left panel holds your projects and your tasks.

The right panel displays the details of whatever project you have open. So if you've uploaded a document for Project A, then the document will display in this right panel when you've got the associated project highlighted on the left. You'll also see your current activity, and basic info, which lays out all your tasks.

Other than the project view, there's an at-a-glance timeline, time reporting and profiles. You can access profiles of those you're working on projects with. I'm surprised to see that there's no easy way of inviting new members, or setting up profiles and assigning permissions to other group members. There's also no way to view all of your own tasks across projects—you'll need to open projects up individually.

With the entrance of the Facebook platform, I saw a good number of business-oriented and project management services seeking out ways in which they could leverage such an opportunity. Not too many found good ways in which to integrate project management tools with Facebook, but that doesn't mean the curiosity has been squelched, especially with LinkedIn joining the open movement (and possibly being acquired) as well.

But I still feel that more integrated features that would enable end users to better align a project management tool like 5pm would be beneficial, especially as it has no differentiating features. I personally find integrated email tools for task updates and scheduling, like Sandy or Ikordo, to be helpful as well.

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